1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to managing resources in a virtual machine environment and more specifically to a dynamic table configuration in a virtual machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
Virtual machines (VMs) allow a computer to simultaneously support and execute two or more computing environments. A computer environment comprises the operating system as well as user applications and data. A VM is configured to borrow computing resources such as CPU, disk, and memory from a host computer and co-exist alongside the host computer as a guest computer.
Due to a large software footprint, current VMs can not be easily transported from one host computer to another host computer. To be portable, the VM requires the capability to adapt to any given host environment and reconfigure its resources based on the presence or absence of hardware or operating system resources on the host system. Additionally, the resources on the guest computer must remain isolated from the resources on the host computer, and vice-versa.
When a VM accesses operating system resources on the host computer, the host computer isolates certain operating system resources such as the file system, registry, kernel objects and services from the guest computer. As such, there exists a need to determining whether to access operating system resources within the host computer or operating system resources within the guest computer to maintain isolation between the host computer and the guest computer.